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Focus: Ebenezer Brown

Eleven days ago, sitting in his fourth floor office in the Adelphi, in London’s West End, Adair Turner signed off his long-awaited report on pensions. It had been a mammoth exercise, taking three years since his appointment by Tony Blair to head a special Pensions Commission.

From the start he knew the biggest threat to the project was Gordon Brown. There had been friction between 10 and 11 Downing Street over his appointment. The chancellor, who likes to maintain an iron grip on the domestic agenda, baulked at an outsider invading his territory.

As with the commission’s 318-page interim report, published in October last year, the document due to be published this Wednesday was written by Turner from start to finish.

His role was to steer the government through a tricky political maze. People are living longer in retirement and longevity is set to increase further, but the country is